I heard rumors from The Digital Bits that those people who’d sent back their defective Meaning of Life DVD were being sent back equally defective replacements! Even though the replacements were available by mid-November I took no chances, waiting until January 5 to send disc one back to MCA/Universal. An agency called Lee Fulfillment sent my replacement Disc 1 back. I got it yesterday and, thankfully, it plays perfectly. There are no interlacing problems and the disc is at last watchable.I happened upon more interlacing problems in another new title. This time on disc two of Cheers: The Second Season. Strangely, they only pop up in one episode, “They Called Me Mayday”, and only in its second half (after what would’ve been the commercial break). This Cheers box set had another even stranger problem: one shot of Sam in the second to last episode is extremely grainy and it even looks slightly sped up, causing some choppy and chipmunky audio! It’s a shame such a great show is exhibiting such wear and tear, especially since the first season box looked flawless.
Customers at an area Burger King drive-thru are being told “You don’t need a couple of Whoppers. You are too fat. Pull ahead.” This is not coming from the employees however, but 
From the “I Guess I’ll Just Never Learn” Department: I just ordered a new SATA drive for my supercomputer. As you’ll recall, it was the SATA drives which failed last month, causing me to lose between 160 and 200 GBs of data on my RAID. (Unless I can scrounge $1,000 to $15,000 for a data recovery service.)
I said the other day how I hadn’t weighed myself. It seemed improper not to, though, on the outset of a diet, so I performed that formality on Sunday (on Day Two). I weighed in at a hefty 238½, which, considering my last official weigh-in, on January 1 2002, was 235 pounds, is not all that bad. Five and a half pounds gained in two years.
I see over at the 
Loreena McKennitt published her 
I’m very very hungry.
They’ve been predicting a hellacious snowfall for this weekend. The snow arrived this afternoon. It fell pretty hard at first, but has tapered off. It’s supposed to snow all night and leave six to eight inches, which is a change from the original forecast of two to four feet. [Now I see this has been further revised to one to two inches of accumulation.]
